“Thinking no longer means any more than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.”

— Theodor W. Adorno

Thedor W. Adorno’s Biography

Theodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany’s foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno’s student and assistant. The scope of Adorno’s influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno’s published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

“We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion—quite apart from the contents themselves that could be lost—would mean that, humanly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence. For memory and depth are the same, or rather, depth cannot be reached by man except through remembrance.”

–Hannah Arendt, “What is Authority?”

Toward the beginning of her essay on “What is Authority?,” Arendt warns of the danger of forgetting. She cautions not out of fear that if we forget the meaning of authority, we hazard being enslaved by an authoritarian government. To the contrary, she reminds us just how authoritarian regimes preserve freedom when compared to a tyranny or a totalitarian government. The peril is that of becoming shallow–perhaps a fate worse than enslavement, or at least so it is portrayed by Aldous Huxley, a fellow author devoted to considering and preventing totalitarianism. Yet what is the connection between authority and depth? And does Arendt seek to resuscitate authority to save us from shallowness, or is she up to something else? Continue reading →

“We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.”

— Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong’s Biography

Mao Zedong, Wade-Giles romanization Mao Tse-tung (born Dec. 26, 1893, Shaoshan, Hunan province, China—died Sept. 9, 1976, Beijing), principal Chinese Marxist theorist, soldier, and statesman who led his nation’s communist revolution. Leader of the Chinese Communist Party from 1935, he was chairman (chief of state) of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1959 and chairman of the party until his death.When China emerged from a half century of revolution as the world’s most populous nation and launched itself on a path of economic development and social change, Mao Zedong occupied a critical place in the story of the country’s resurgence. To be sure, he did not play a dominant role throughout the whole struggle. In the early years of the Chinese Communist Party, he was a secondary figure, though by no means a negligible one, and even after the 1940s (except perhaps during the Cultural Revolution) the crucial decisions were not his alone. Nevertheless, looking at the whole period from the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 to Mao’s death in 1976, one can fairly regard Mao Zedong as the principal architect of the new China.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Wes Enzinna has an extraordinary essay in the NY Times Magazine on the utopian, anarchist, military experiment of Rojava, a small, quasi-autonomous territory in Syria that a part of the Kurdish PKK is trying to turn into a secular and liberal homeland. Enzinna traveled there to teach a class in free speech. He describes some of the surprising aspects of life in Rojava: “In accordance with a philosophy laid out by a leftist revolutionary named Abdullah Ocalan, Rojavan women had been championed as leaders, defense of the environment enshrined in law and radical direct democracy enacted in the streets.” The territory is governed by the PKK, which includes “an all-female force called the Y.P.J., or Female Protection Units. These forces have become key American allies in the region.” Turkey considers the PKK terrorists. But many others have a different view. “…[T]o sympathetic Western visitors, Rojava was something else entirely: a place where the seeds of the Arab Spring promised to blossom into utopia. ‘What you are doing,’ said Raymond Joliffe, a member of Britain’s House of Lords, during a trip in May 2015, ‘is a unique experiment that deserves to succeed.’ A Dutch professor named Jan Best de Vries arrived in December 2014 and donated $10,000 to help buy books for Kurdish university students. David Graeber, a founder of Occupy Wall Street, visited that same month and wrote before his trip that ‘the autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one of few bright spots–albeit a very bright one–to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution.’ In May, I saw an announcement on Facebook for the Mesopotamian Social Sciences Academy, a new, coed university in Rojava’s de facto capital, Qamishli. This in itself was revolutionary. For years, Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, forbade many Syrian Kurds to study. In ISIS territory just 15 miles away, Kurdish girls were routinely tortured for being Westernized heretics–sometimes tied by their ponytails to car bumpers and dragged to their deaths. In Rojava, they were being educated. When I sent a message to the academy’s Facebook page, requesting more information, I received a reply from Yasin Duman, a Kurdish graduate student living in Turkey. He had taught several courses there, he said, and when he found out I was a writer and professor in New York, we discussed a journalism class. Duman explained that Rojava’s youth had little experience with the idea of free speech. Perhaps I could teach them: ‘A free people has to have freedom of speech,’ he said. It would be a cultural exchange. I would teach writing, and my students would show me what life was like in Rojava. We decided that I would spend a week in July giving a crash course in journalism basics: how to report, how to interview and how to document the war raging around them.” The people in Rojava have a near-fanatical loyalty to Abdullah Ocalan, the charismatic founder of the PKK who sits in jail in Turkey. Enzinna notes that Ocalan “looms as a Wizard-of-Oz-like presence in Rojava.” He also points out that amidst a horrific war, the PKK-based government in Rojava has committed war crimes and fallen short of the ideals it was charged to uphold. But overall, Enzinna offers an incredible glimpse into a unique and hopeful social experiment in the midst of the hell that now is Syria.

Rosamund Urwin writes about Deeyah Khan, creator of the new film Jihad: A British Story. For Khan, recruiting young Brits into ISIS is a matter of teaching them about love. “Khan feels frustrated about the media debate after the Paris attacks. ‘One guy will say, “it’s all about Islam”. The other will say, “it has nothing to do with Islam”. I want to throw something at the TV! What are we doing about it? We don’t have time for douchebags in suits to be pointing fingers at each other. Of course Islam has something to do with it–people are doing it in the name of Islam–but it’s also about human vulnerabilities–needs that get filled somehow.’ IS, she notes, spends hundreds of hours recruiting each fighter. It builds an intimate connection on Skype: finding out who this person is, their dreams. ‘IS takes the yearning, the sadness, the anger, preys on that and draws people into becoming cannon fodder.’ Perhaps because we’re sitting in a Canary Wharf restaurant, Plateau, surrounded by Savile Row suits, I suggest IS may be the ultimate headhunters. Khan nods. ‘They are. It’s also like grooming. They find out what all your needs are, they build that loyalty and love.’ Love, she acknowledges, seems a strange word to use when we’re talking about a hateful ideology. ‘It doesn’t start with hate. It starts out as a human need that is not being met, and with love and loyalty between the recruiter and the follower.’ Those radicalised by former über-recruiter Abu Muntasir describe him as the father they wished they had had.”

Steve Locke writes about how he was stopped and questioned because he fit the description of someone who had committed a crime. After he was let go, he went back to his office on his way to teach his class: “My colleague was in our shared office and she was able to calm me down. I had about 45 minutes until my class began and I had to teach. I forgot the lesson I had planned. I forgot the schedule. I couldn’t think about how to do my job. I thought about the fact my word counted for nothing, they didn’t believe that I wasn’t a criminal. They had to find out. My word was not enough for them. My ID was not enough for them. My handmade one-of-a-kind knit hat was an object of suspicion. My Ralph Lauren quilted blazer was only a ‘puffy coat.’ That white woman could just walk up to a cop and talk about me like I was an object for regard. I wanted to go back and spit in their faces. The cops were probably deeply satisfied with how they handled the interaction, how they didn’t escalate the situation, how they were respectful and polite.” The cops probably were deeply satisfied with their performance. The vastly different reactions different people will have to this account are themselves many reasons it should be read.

In an interview, Teju Cole makes a case for the critic in the age of a bloated art market: “[W]hen someone pays $160 million for a Rembrandt or a de Kooning… I don’t even know what’s going on there. Is it only acquisitiveness? I don’t know what kind of feeling they have for the art… Maybe the question should be: someone who privately owns a Vermeer, there’s some in museums, they’re very nice. Some of it can be in private ownership, it’s okay, it’s part of the circulation. What it’s our job to do [as critics] is to help create and sustain value for overlooked work… So to do the kind of writing around that work, the celebration of that work, to give an account of how that work functions in the world: to say, here’s this photographer from Mali, here’s this sculptor from Nigeria, here’s this Honduran filmmaker, we’re doing this festival of Brazilian film. You know! Those things. I’m talking about this not as a fiction writer but as a critical writer. Some of our work is to look at the overlooked, to draw attention to those worthy things. The question is not always about what people are paying $50 million for, but the stuff that is only fifty thousand, only ten thousand, and getting that stuff into the museum space and have it be what it needs to be, to write books about it, to get it in the syllabus.”

In the wake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he will donate 99% of his stock in his company to charity over the course of his lifetime, John Cassidy considers the present and future of philanthrocapitalism: “It’s not just the size of the donations that the wealthy are making that demands attention, though. Charitable giving on this scale makes modern capitalism, with all of its inequalities and injustices, seem somewhat more defensible. Having created hugely successful companies that have generated almost unimaginable wealth, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffett are sending a powerful message to Wall Street hedge-fund managers, Russian oligarchs, European industrialists, Arab oil sheiks, and anybody else who has accumulated a vast fortune: ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected.’… People like Zuckerberg and Gates, by virtue of their philanthropic efforts, can have a much bigger say in determining policy outcomes than ordinary citizens can. (As Matthew Yglesias pointed out on Vox, one of the advantages of registering the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as an L.L.C. is that it can spend money on political ads.) The more money billionaires give to their charitable foundations, which in most cases remain under their personal control, the more influence they will accumulate. And relatively speaking, anyway, the less influence everybody else will have. Some Americans–not all of them disciples of Ayn Rand–might say that this is a good thing. I have already cited some of the Gates Foundation’s good works. Isn’t Michael Bloomberg, with his efforts to reform gun laws, promoting the public interest? Isn’t George Soros, through his donations to civil-rights organizations, lining up on the side of the angels? In these two instances, my own answers would be yes and yes; but the broader point stands. The divide between philanthropy and politics is already fuzzy. As the ‘philanthrocapitalism’ movement gets bigger, this line will be increasingly hard to discern.”

J. Malcolm Garcia profiles a bookseller in Afghanistan: “She walks without hurry, somewhat stiffly, sore, a diminutive woman unnoticed, burdened, using her chin to clamp down on a column of books she holds against her chest. Thin paperbacks most of them, a few hardcover. All written by her husband. The books appear worn as she does. Her tired eyes, lined face. Her forehead wrinkled into streams. Maybe from long, nightly exposure to the humid, grainy air, the white smoke rising from kabob grills wafting around and powdering her with ash. Maybe from seventeen years of selling her homebound husband’s books. She does not know, does not really consider her fatigue any more than she reflects on how she sees and breathes. Block by block she maneuvers through the teeming sidewalks of Kabul’s Shar-E-Naw shopping district until she enters Ice-Milk Restaurant, stops at tables. ‘Would you like to buy a book?’ she says. The twentysomething customers talk to one another staring at their iPhones and ignore her. Outside, more young people gather, dressed in tight blue jeans and dazzling, multicolored shirts reminiscent of the disco era. They talk loudly, with an air of We are special, laughing, hurrying past storefronts promoting Mastercard Premium, Marco Polo Garments, Alfalah Visa, United Bank, Body Building Fitness Gym, New Fashions Kabul Shop. Their shadows converge and fade into the glow of so many green and blue and red blinking lights dangling from awnings, unfolded above advertisements for pizza and club sandwiches and chicken fingers, and those same shadows cross a boy standing in the middle of the sidewalk and leaning on crutches, his left leg gone, his right hand out for money, and the young people swerve around him as if he were standing in the center of a traffic roundabout, and amid this confusion the book lady leaves Ice-Milk Restaurant without having sold one book and stops at another restaurant, Fast Food Pizza and Burger. The West’s influence can be seen throughout Shar-E-Naw in the kaleidoscopic displays of consumerism and high prices that for a moment render the decades of ongoing war here as obsolete as the donkey-drawn carts plodding next to black Hummers stalled in traffic. But the sight of a maimed begging child, injured, she presumes, by a mine, reminds her that beneath the sequined mannequins and suggested affluence and rush to catch up with the Twenty-First Century, Shar-E-Naw is still Afghanistan.”

Rebecca Solnit reports from Paris’s conference on climate change: “It was amazing to be in that room with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, and Barack Obama–quite possibly the four most powerful people on earth–along with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Framework Convention Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, and dozens of other world leaders. It was amazing and often also boring. The statements were largely positive, predictable, vague, and repetitious. Of course, world leaders have to be graded on a curve. Putin’s statement at least recognized the reality of climate change and suggested that we should do something about it, which is an improvement over his record of denying and dismissing the problem. Obama spoke of his summer trip to Alaska, whose melting permafrost and burning tundra are ‘a preview of one possible future’–though it’s the present, not the future, for Alaska. Still, Obama did acknowledge one of the central facts of the day: ‘We know the truth that many nations have contributed little to climate change but will be the first to feel its threats.’ Given this fact, it’s no surprise that things got real when some of the less famous world leaders took their turns. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi noted that Africa is both the continent that emits least per capita and the one that faces the gravest consequences. Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, the president of Djibouti, itemized the ways his region would be destroyed, and is being destroyed now. ‘It is clear that if nothing is done,’ he said, ‘the peoples of East Africa will find it impossible to survive.'”

Chris Lebron in the The Stone writes about what a certain kind of unhappiness means, one that comes when one realizes that independence does not yield liberation. “My first serious life lesson in those promising and formative adult years was that independence and liberation are not the same thing. Indeed, they work at different levels. Independence is local. The powers that be take a step back from managing your life. Liberation is still far away. You believe you will step into the space opened up to steer your own life, and you do step in, but find that you are shackled from the inside. But you did not place those restraints there. Rather, you inherited them. Maybe from your father’s sad face. More likely from the very ways of the world that placed that sadness in him–those beatings in the street, unfair treatment by employers, and his precarious stewardship over the local young women and men whose own young lives could still be saved from the inheritance their own parents most likely had ready for them. You may later look in a mirror and wonder where the lightness of being in your own face went. Then, one day, your son begins asking you: ‘Daddy, are you happy?’ And you resolve to cut him out of the bum will handed down over the generations. You think, this is an heirloom he can do without…. I spend most of my days on the campus of Yale University, one of the world’s most elite, respected and powerful, where I try to contribute knowledge to a world in need of viewpoints like mine, but surely not only mine. This, and all other college campuses, are supposed to allow for, among other things, the flourishing of hope. College students are meant to be spending their time formulating the meaning of their newfound independence and discovering how to convert that independence into liberation. For many, it goes as planned. But a great many black and brown students nationally find themselves instead subject to a corrupt and perverse set of manners. They find that some person, some institution, some history, malignant ignorance or benignly neglectful force intends for them to mind their shackles. They are reminded that their independence is comparatively worth far less than that of their white counterparts, never mind their liberation. These students sense that they do not want their own kids asking: ‘Are you happy?’ Critics have dismissed the nation’s student protesters as mere coddled young people in a rage over some nonsense having to do with costumes or fraternity parties or whatever else the headlines say is the matter. I can tell you that none of these really is at the root. Rather, these and similar events are the catalyst for a revelation–that the rage and sadness these students inherited have been there for years, waiting to make themselves known. The inheritance of disaffection can only really come into its own with the maturity of social consciousness.”

The symposium will combine lectures, panel discussion, artist talks, and presentations to explore the topic in its various political, economic, and aethetic dimensions and open new ways to think about surveillance in the 21st century. At the heart of Images of Surveillance is the recognition that surveillance as object of study is far too complex to be grasped from any single point of view and thus requires us to combine multiple perspectives into a fuller picture of what surveillance might be. Such an approach rejects both disciplinary boundaries and post-modern indeterminacy in favor of a concerted effort to create overlaps and conceptual chains across a wide variety of practices and discourses.

This week on the Blog, Jennie Han explores the concept of “home” with respect to our discussions of the ongoing student protests on American college campuses in the Quote of the Week. Madame Swetchine draws a metaphor between thinking and nature in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, in a special feature, Jerome Kohn remembers Hannah Arendt on the 40th anniversary of her death.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Danielle Allen argues that “the real issue” in the campus protests around the country is not free speech. It is, rather, “how to think about social equality.” For Allen, we are coming up against old and petrified cultural and aesthetic ideals that were imagined in a time of racial inequality. What is needed is a “re-orientation of our cultural life toward the embrace” of the ideal of equality. She writes: “To achieve social equality, however, against a backdrop of centuries of racial social subordination demands not only the vision of prophets who can imagine that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. It calls, too, for cultural transformation, for a revolution, even, in our ordinary habits of interaction. The fight over cultural transformation is being waged on the grounds of how to deal with offensiveness. We all have a beautiful, wonderful democratic right to be offensive. Yet offensiveness is not, in fact, innocuous. So how can we thread this needle? The issue is not, of course, about single, specific insults, of which we all have tales, and which we all have to learn to take in stride. I, too, was called ‘n-‘ on campus in the lovely, deep late-night dark of Princeton in the spring of 1993. The point, rather, is that, in the case of race, such insults represent a rising to the surface of what psychologists call ‘implicit bias,’ a general attribution in this country of lesser value to the lives of dark-skinned people than to those with lighter skin. Psychologists have found that not only non-blacks but also blacks harbor implicit bias against blacks. And implicit bias does its dirty work in any number of contexts: hiring decisions; policing intuitions; school discipline; teacher-student mentoring; elections; and so on…. How do you transform communities and environments that were developed to resonate with the aesthetic tastes and ways of life of one demographic group when they are meant to be homes equally welcoming to all? How do you adjust social habits that have flowed out of long traditions of hierarchy to perform nobly at the table of brotherhood? The seriousness of these questions is real, and it is reasonable and necessary for the institutions of civil society to address them. I think that in all of this controversy we have missed the biggest story of all: Missouri graduate student Jonathan Butler starved himself for a week in pursuit of social equality. His action accurately measures the significance of the goal.” Allen is right that the issues are grave and important, and she is correct insofar as in nearly all of the recent cases of campus protest, speech has been met with speech. When students have demanded too much–for example, the firing of House Masters at Yale or that the President of Amherst College issue a statement expressing the College’s intolerance for posters on campus advocating free speech and saying that the free speech posters were “racially insensitive to the students of color on our college campus”–administrators have thankfully refused to go along. It is a right of free speech to make demands, however silly or offensive. That is why Allen is right to suggest that in most instances the accusations of a violation of free speech are overblown. And she is also right that the yelling over free speech actually obscures the difficult discussions about race and equality that need to be had on college campuses and beyond. That is why the ninth annual Hannah Arendt Center fall conference will ask: “How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex, and Religion on Campus.” Save the Date: Oct. 20-21, 2016.–RB

Randall Kennedy considers the recent incident at Harvard Law School where pieces of black tape were put over the faces of the portraits of black law professors. While many at Harvard are outraged, Kennedy–whose own portrait was defaced–says he feels neither alarmed nor hurt. He takes it for granted that racism exists at Harvard, at colleges, and around the country. Like Danielle Allen above, Kennedy understands that there is implicit bias at work in our society–indeed in every society and in every social group. But Kennedy suggests that we not confuse a “pervasive bigotry abetted by an unwillingness to redress subtle vestiges of historical racial injustice” with something less pervasive. He writes: “Assuming that it was a racist gesture, there is a need to calibrate carefully its significance. On a campus containing thousands of students, faculty members and staff, one should not be surprised or unglued by an instance or even a number of instances of racism. The question is whether those episodes are characteristic or outliers. Substantial numbers of onlookers believe that this episode is by no means isolated, that it offers a revealing glimpse into the soul of Harvard Law School.” Kennedy points out that shortly after the black tape appeared, it was removed and replaced by “hundreds of brightly colored stickers expressing respect and appreciation, and rejecting bigotry.” In this respect, he advises that we attend not only to our failures but also to our successes, especially the successes of the campus activists who have elevated the dissatisfactions of African American students to the top of the higher-education agenda. And amidst these successes, Kennedy offers us caution. “Successes, however, can generate or exacerbate destructive tendencies. I worry about two in particular. One involves exaggerating the scope of the racism that the activists oppose and fear. The other involves minimizing their own strength and the victories that they and their forebears have already achieved. I have asked dissidents to tell me with as much particularity as possible the circumstances that led them to say that they feel burdened, alienated, disrespected, oppressed. They complain of a paucity of black professors, courses in which racial issues, though pertinent, are marginalized, teachers whose interactions with black students display far less engagement than interactions with nonblack students, white classmates who implicitly or even expressly question the intellectual capacity of black peers (‘You know, don’t you, that they are here only because of affirmative action’) and campus police officers who subject black students to a more intensive level of surveillance than white students. Students are also taking to task schools that allegedly disregard the sensibilities of minorities by memorializing figures who perpetrated cruel wrongs, including the Royall family, who sponsored what became Harvard Law School with funds drawn from the labor and sale of enslaved blacks; John C. Calhoun, the statesman for whom a residential college at Yale is named despite his having propounded the idea that slavery was a positive good; and Woodrow Wilson, the former president who is lionized at Princeton despite having reinforced racial segregation throughout the federal government. While some of these complaints have a ring of validity, several are dubious. A decision by a professor to focus on a seemingly dry, technical issue rather than a more accessible, volatile subject involving race might well reflect a justifiable pedagogical strategy. Opposition to racial affirmative action can stem from a wide range of sources other than prejudice. Racism and its kindred pathologies are already big foes; there is no sustained payoff in exaggerating their presence, thus making them more formidable than they actually are.”

Jacqueline Rose in the London Review of Books has a long, moving, and deeply provocative reading of the roles of race, sex, and disability in the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius. Rose offers compelling portraits of Pistorius and his murdered girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, as well as of the black female South African Judge, Thokozile Matilda Masipa. Struggling to untangle the racial and sexual demons that terrorize South Africa, Rose concludes: “If there is a lesson I take from all this, it is that we should not disavow our hatreds in a futile effort to make ourselves–to make the world–clean.” Her essay is a brave effort at making good on that promise to not disavow our hatreds. In one of many literary reflections on the trial, she writes: “I happened to be in Cape Town a week after the killing of Reeva Steenkamp. At the time I was reading A Bantu in My Bathroom, a book of essays by Eusebius McKaiser, a South African political and social theorist and radio talkshow host. He is known for being provocative and likes to challenge South Africans to confront their darkest thoughts. (His collection is subtitled ‘Debating Race, Sexuality and Other Uncomfortable South African Topics’.) In 2012, 18 years after the end of apartheid, he was looking for a room to rent and lighted on an advertisement from a woman willing to share her house but only, the ad stipulated, with a white person. On the phone, McKaiser got her almost to the point of sealing the deal before announcing that he wasn’t white (she hung up when he suggested her choice might be racist). When he related the incident to the audience of his weekly radio programme, Politics and Morality on Talk Radio 702, two responses predominated. Either the listeners sided with the owner of the house (her property, her preference, no different from ‘only non-smokers need apply’), or they made a more subtle but disquieting distinction: if the room was in a cottage in her backyard, the choice would be racist, but she clearly had the right to share her house, or not, with whomever she pleased. ‘Reasonable’ as the second preference might seem, McKaiser concedes in his essay, it is still ‘morally odious’, still ‘the product of our racist past’. ‘This viewpoint,’ he elaborates, ‘is an acknowledgment (indeed, an expression) of a deep racial angst. Why else would you be fine with Sipho [the name McKaiser gives the fictional black tenant] sleeping in the flat outside but heaven forbid that you should wake up in the morning and the first thing you see on your way to the bathroom is the heart attack-inducing spectacle of Sipho smiling at you, a horror that just might elicit a scream of apartheid proportions: “Help! There is a Bantu in my bathroom!”‘ ‘Not one listener,’ McKaiser writes, ‘grappled with how it is that 18 years after our democratic journey … racialism’s reach and endurance inside their homes and hearts dare not be spoken about.’ Not one avoided the cliché–indeed they all rehearsed it to perfection–that your private life is private and it is up to you what you do in your own home (a cliché whose potentially lethal consequences were of course long ago dismantled by feminism). In failing to do so, they ‘betrayed dark secrets about themselves and our country’. In another essay McKaiser refers to the Coloureds of Cape Town–he himself is a Coloured–as ‘the dirty little secret’ of the city: ‘Cape Town, you see, treats Coloured people like dirt.’ ‘The dirty secrets of both Jozi [Johannesburg] and Cape Town are a stain on both cities’ images, like mud on a kid’s new white pants.’ It soon became clear that a strange, racially charged and legally confused distinction would be at the heart of the trial. If Pistorius didn’t fire the shots through the toilet door in the knowledge that Steenkamp was inside, then he believed he was shooting at an intruder, in which case the charge of premeditated murder wouldn’t hold up. There was no doubt that the second possibility was seen–or rather would be presented by Barry Roux for the defence–as the lesser offence, and not just because the legal category of ‘putative private defence’ (defending oneself against a presumed attacker, even if the presumption was wrong) could present the shooting as a legitimate response to fear. What was largely unspoken was that in the second case we can be more or less certain that the person killed in the bathroom would be–could only be–imagined as black. ‘As the judge will not have failed to register,’ the journalist John Carlin writes in Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius, ‘if his story were true–and even if it were not–the faceless intruder of his imagination had to have had a black face, because the fact was that for white people crime mostly did have a black face.'”

Luc Sante describes his method of finding material for his upcoming book on a Paris we don’t often think about: “I wanted to tell the story of what Louis Chevalier calls the ‘working and dangerous classes.’ Those are my people–my forebears on both sides all the way back, Belgian in my case but with many cultural points of similarity–and it also happens to be the aspect of Parisian life that American readers know the least about. It’s easy enough to define the borders there, since they were vigorously enforced by the larger culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as indeed they still are. Ambiguity arises only in a few specific areas: the worlds of literature and art, for example. Many writers and artists portrayed the poor sympathetically, and even fought on their behalf, but they themselves were not of that class. Gay life is perhaps even more subject to ambiguity, since it so often involves crossing classes…. My method is the magpie’s: I look for shiny things. That is, I look for concrete material details of daily life, and I look for vigorous prose, which is the only kind I can read for very long. That effectively bars a great deal of scholarly work, but I didn’t feel its loss. It’s not hard to find vigorously written, colorfully detailed accounts of life in the Paris of the past, in all kinds of places. There is not just the eloquence of the people you list, but also that of reactionaries like Maxime du Camp and the Goncourt brothers, and even of a police commissioner like Adolphe Gronfier. There is such an abundance of engaging writing about the city, much of it untranslated, that my research felt like a spree.”

Since Brown v. Board of Education, the rejection of “separate but equal” is one tenet of American law. Fareed Zakaria writes that many of the demands made by student protestors over the last few weeks run counter to that basic tenet. “Over the past four decades, whenever universities have faced complaints about exclusion or racism–often real–the solution proposed and usually accepted has been to create more programs, associations and courses for minority students. This is understandable, because these groups have been historically ignored, slighted and demeaned. But is this solution working, or is it making things worse? A 2004 empirical study led by Harvard University psychologist James Sidanius (who is African American) concluded that ‘there was no indication that the experiences in these ethnically oriented … organizations increased the students’ sense of common identity with members of other groups or their sense of belonging to the wider university community. Furthermore … the evidence suggested that membership in ethnically oriented student organizations actually increased the perception that ethnic groups are locked into zero-sum competition with one another and the feeling of victimization by virtue of one’s ethnicity.’ The academic programs that have been created and expanded also reinforce feelings of separateness. Again, there was a need for greater attention to many of the areas of study, and some extraordinary scholarship has been produced in these fields. But the cumulative effect is one that distinguished scholar Tony Judt wrote about in an essay for the New York Review of Books in 2010. ‘Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others,’ he noted. ‘The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves–thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.'” None of this changes or challenges the moving testimony of students, largely African American students, of how demeaning and de-humanizing the reality of racism is in their lives. It is natural and even sensible for students who feel marginalized and dismissed to seek safe spaces. As colleges and universities announce new programs to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on, among other things, new Deans of Diversity and new cultural and social centers for particular student groups, one hopes that research along the lines that Zakaria mentions will at least be considered.–RB

One refrain heard over and again during the student protests of the past few weeks is that those who don’t live as black on American campuses can’t understand the feelings of those who do. This is a truism, and yet the very essence of a liberal education is to seek, to explore, and to understand the experiences of those who are different from oneself. Thus it is helpful that Jim Sleeper seeks to articulate four separate ‘Black Afflictions’ that are the root of the experience of being black on American campuses. He lists: “The pressure of others’ outsize hopes”, “The pressure of white fear”, “White classmates’ myopia”, and “A Wall of Malevolence”. Here is a sample: “A four-walled vise presses in upon every black student at Yale, even as doors in those walls open and close unpredictably and the walls themselves sometimes seem to withdraw–all this invisible to most of us, its pressures unseen and unfelt. 1. The pressure of others’ outsize hopes. Last year a black Yale undergraduate I know was working late one night in the office of a history professor for whom he was a research assistant. A custodian entered the room to empty the waste baskets. Black, too, but graying and near retirement, the older man broke into a broad smile. ‘This makes me glad,’ he said, as much from the heart as from the mouth. ‘This makes me glad,’ he repeated. ‘Thank you,’ the student replied, cordially but cryptically, his accent signaling his upbringing in formerly British East Africa. A distancing look flickered across the countenance of the custodian, a descendant of Southern sharecroppers and slaves whose grandparents had come to New Haven during World War II to work in gun factories now long since closed. But as quickly as the older man’s doubt surfaced, he displaced it with a reaffirming smile and nod. Neither man needed to say anything more. Both understood that although the younger had grown up in a majority black society–and in an elite bubble within it, at that–they both now bore burdens of white American incomprehension, coldness, fear and, occasionally, of the kind of over-solicitude that is almost an insult. This African-American janitor expected this East African student to mitigate those burdens a bit by setting a different example, and the hope is credible precisely because the vast differences in these men’s backgrounds and prospects are invisible to most whites and, for that matter, to most non-black people ‘of color.’ ‘It only added to the weight of things,’ the student told me, recalling the encounter a year later. ‘If I remain here, I’m obligated to meet not only my parents’ expectations but also those of black people in a white country I didn’t grow up in.’ He does plan to stay, not only because, on balance, that broadens his prospects against narrower ones back home, but also because he would take ‘some pride and satisfaction’ in lessening the weight of racism for others. But contemplating the challenge while making occasional campus forays to meet it ‘saddens me,’ he said three times during our conversation–saddens him in ways few of the rest of us comprehend. Sometimes it takes an outsider’s shock to alert us Americans to what we usually ignore. A student from Tehran, where laborers and service workers don’t differ noticeably in physiognomy from the rest of the population, told me how strange he found it, on arriving at Yale, to see an overwhelmingly black workforce serving an overwhelmingly non-black population. At least 70 percent of Yale’s custodial and cafeteria workers are black. Fewer than 5 percent of the faculty are. Like the student from East Africa who finds himself carrying the hopes of a janitor with decades of white racism on his back, other black Yalies find that most black elders in their lives in New Haven are service workers. Thirty-five percent of the city’s 130,000 residents are African-American; 31.8 percent are non-Hispanic white. Yale, including its medical affiliates, is black workers’ biggest employer.”

Drew Gilpin Faust pens an elegy to historian John Hope Franklin: “Franklin detailed the way the antebellum South rewrote the history of the American Revolution to justify its increasing commitment to slavery, how the popular history represented by the 1915 film Birth of a Nation worked to justify the early-twentieth-century revival of the Klan, how in a volume commissioned for a prominent series on southern history, respected historian E. Merton Coulter’s racist assumptions produced a distorted view of Reconstruction that made an implicit argument against the extension of civil rights in the years immediately following World War II. But Franklin did not simply critique and revise; he did not just overturn existing interpretations by bringing a different lens to bear, or even by just grounding the narrative of the past in what were quite revolutionary assumptions of common human capacity and dignity. Franklin, the scholar, unearthed reams of new facts–facts no one had bothered to look for previously, facts buried in archives, newspapers, government records, facts no historian had searched for until history decided black lives mattered. Franklin’s approach to the doing of history is perhaps most faithfully and explicitly chronicled in the introduction to his biography of the nineteenth-century African-American historian George Washington Williams. A pioneer in charting the black experience, Williams, who died in 1891, had been all but forgotten until Franklin began ‘stalking’ him. Franklin recounts the story of how over three decades he traveled to countless offices, libraries, and archives on three continents. He pursued clues and leads with imagination and unquenchable curiosity until he was able to piece together a full portrait of the man and his work. Franklin rescued Williams from oblivion to install him in his rightful place as a pathbreaking black intellectual, a precursor to Franklin himself in creating a true history of the nation’s past and the place of African-Americans within it.”

Ian Bogost suggests that Black Friday is in keeping with the meaning of Christmas: “Christmas gift exchange owes a debt to the social imbalance of potlatch-like excess rather than reciprocal exchange. Gift-giving symbolizes the ultimate gift of the Christian God. As John 3:16 puts it, ‘God loved the world so much, that he gave his one and only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not be lost but have eternal life.’ Theologically speaking, both God’s and Jesus’s sacrifices set an unreachable bar: a gift so peerless that no worldly version could ever best it. It is an excessive gift, a surplus of divine love. Black Friday’s gift-giving is not nearly as magnanimous, but there are gifts being exchanged nevertheless, and not only from parent to child or spouse to spouse. When Amazon or Walmart or Best Buy or Target or any other retailer offers sales, discounts, special hours, and all the rest, it’s easy to see them just as brusque trappings of consumerism run amok. That’s not entirely wrong, but it doesn’t tell the whole story, either: Sales and discounts are also gifts. And as gifts, they also participate in the social practice of reciprocity and one-upsmanship. Instead of offering greater or more valuable offerings, Black Friday deals issue their own version of the gift’s challenge: They allow companies to say, ‘Look what we are willing to give away, even though we normally operate by currency exchange… Sacrilegious though the suggestion might be, perhaps Black Friday ought to be thought of as the real start of Advent, rather than as a counterpoint to it. As a ritual, it is actually closer to the excessive origin of God’s sacrifice than is unwrapping the latest toys and electronics a month hence. Sure, we could do without the retail bedlam and trampling, without the shadow of consumption and corporate rule by proxy, and all the other very real defects of Black Friday. But there’s also something fundamentally fitting about it for the season.”

The symposium will combine lectures, panel discussion, artist talks, and presentations to explore the topic in its various political, economic, and aethetic dimensions and open new ways to think about surveillance in the 21st century. At the heart of Images of Surveillance is the recognition that surveillance as object of study is far too complex to be grasped from any single point of view and thus requires us to combine multiple perspectives into a fuller picture of what surveillance might be. Such an approach rejects both disciplinary boundaries and post-modern indeterminacy in favor of a concerted effort to create overlaps and conceptual chains across a wide variety of practices and discourses.

This holiday week on the Blog, Martin Wagner discusses how Arendt reconstructs from Kafka’s work a writer inspired by a world “in which the actions of man depend on nothing but himself and his spontaneity” in the Quote of the Week. Also, American journalist Theodore H. White discusses what it means to go against the thinking of your friends in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking.

Theodore H. White’s Biography

Theodore H. White, in full Theodore Harold White (born May 6, 1915, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 15, 1986, New York, New York), American journalist, historian, and novelist, best known for his astute, suspenseful accounts of the 1960 and 1964 presidential elections.The son of a lawyer, White grew up in Boston and graduated from Boston Latin School in 1932. After graduating from Harvard in 1938, he served as one of Time magazine’s first foreign correspondents, being stationed in East Asia from 1939 to 1945. He then served as European correspondent for the Overseas News Agency (1948–50) and for The Reporter (1950–53). With this extensive background in analyzing other cultures, White was well equipped to tackle the American scene in The Making of the President, 1960 (1961) and The Making of the President, 1964 (1965). Accepted as standard histories of presidential campaigns, these books present their subjects by intelligently juxtaposing events and treating politicians as personalities rather than as symbols.

White’s intimate style of journalism, which had its critics as well as its supporters, had a great influence on campaign coverage. He won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for The Making of the President, 1960; he was also acclaimed for his exclusive interview with Jacqueline Kennedy in the aftermath of her husband’s assassination, in which White compared the short-lived presidency of John F. Kennedy with the legend of Camelot. White went on to analyze the elections of 1968 and 1972 in later books.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Jeannie Suk notices that the student protests that erupted last week at Yale, Mizzou, and elsewhere mobilize the rhetoric of home and the family: “Particularly in the way things have unfolded at Yale, students’ social-justice activism has been expressed, in part, as the need for care from authority figures. When they experience the hurt that motivates them to political action, they’re deeply disappointed with parental surrogates for not responding adequately or quickly enough to support and nurture them. The world in which it’s not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to ‘create a place of comfort and home,’ or to yell, ‘Be quiet … You’re disgusting!,’ and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent. The online scorn heaped on the student who was filmed behaving this way represents an unproductive refusal to compassionately translate her behavior across the generational divide. In a piece called ‘Hurt at Home,’ another Yale student wrote, ‘I feel my home is being threatened,’ and contrasted her comforting relationship with her father to the care she felt students emphatically did not receive from the master of Silliman College. Yale tells its students that the residential college is their ‘home away from home,’ but this generation might be the first to insist so literally on that idea…. The president of Claremont McKenna College–which has recently seen racial-bias protests, hunger strikes, and a high administrator’s resignation–wrote in an e-mail to the community that one role of higher education is to ‘provide a very special home for our students as a bridge from their families to the truly adult and independent world.’ This formulation is particularly poignant at a time when material independence will be elusive for many college students, who are coming of age during a recession, with onerous debt, and may actually go home to their parents for much of their twenties in order to make ends meet. In the midst of the developing story on campus activism, the horror of mass violence in Paris wrought by ISIS brought us back to our experience of the September 11th attacks, an event seared into the child psyches of current college students, and sufficient to have robbed them of the basic sense of safety that my generation enjoyed. The students’ preoccupation with safe spaces and the comfort of home seems a plausible manifestation of the profound lack of security–from violence to financial insolvency–that their generation faces. No wonder that their calls for social justice return to the talisman of safety and care of parental figures.”

This isn’t the first time that metaphors of home have been marshaled as pleas for safety in a suddenly dangerous world. They appeared during the Cold War, when the suburbs turned into a refuge for white families attempting to protect themselves in a homogenized home from the dual threats of Communism and the atomic bomb. The family and social formations encouraged by those metaphors led to an infamously flat and seemingly conformist culture, which led to the countercultural spasms of the 1960s and in turn to the conservative revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, which also mobilized home and family as symbols of a time when the world seemed a little safer, that is, somewhat ironically, than the 1950s. In both cases, the symbolism of the home was used to protect the private lives of white people.

In her essay “What Is Freedom,” Arendt writes that “the public realm stands in the starkest possible contrast to our private domain, where, in the protection of family and home, everything serves or must serve the security of the life process.” Similarly, Richard Rodriguez in his book Hunger of Memory distinguishes the intimacy and safety of the home life of a young Latino immigrant from the publicity and challenges of life at school. As Rodriguez argued at his talk during the 2013 Arendt Center conference “Failing Fast,” becoming a citizen means learning to switch between the two worlds of home and public life; it means acquiring a public self. One important role of higher education is to give students the experience of living away from home, in public, where they can experiment with and learn to assume their public personas. That college, which constitutes a time for taking chances, also means that it is a moment of failure and danger. This has always been the case, but it is also true that students today negotiate a more complicated world of class, race, religion, and gender than students of any prior generation. So many college students now find themselves without safe homes and private places to which they can retreat at moments of crisis. More students at colleges and universities are from diverse and insular communities than ever before. Thrust from their often-sheltered lives, students now must negotiate public interactions with people whose opinions they have never before encountered and that they frequently find threatening. And in college dorms teeming with sometimes obnoxious students eager to try out new ideas, tensions can rise.

No one can live in public all the time, and all of us need moments alone where we can, in private, collect ourselves and steel ourselves for the courage public life demands. At a time when the security of a private space is fleeting for so many young people, colleges and universities have added layers of student deans and counselors to help students through emotional, racial, and sexual crises. Students now call upon and depend on the very administrators for help whom they criticize and protest against. In such a situation, the danger lies less with students and more with administrators who, in the name of consumerism and motivated by an aversion to risk, are creating policies and procedures that shut down the vibrancy of the student experience. Some students may demand trigger warnings, disciplinary procedures, and censorship. That is part of the experience of being young and experimenting with new and powerful if also dangerous ideas. We shouldn’t blame students for speaking and trying out new ideas. The fault, if there is one, is with administrators who accede to these demands. –RB (with assistance from JK)

Save the date for the Hannah Arendt Center’s 2016 conference: “How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex, and Religion on Campus.” October 20-21, 2016.

In the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb interviews Yale Dean Jonathan Holloway. Cobb: “There have been people who look at this situation and say, ‘These students, who are at one of the most élite institutions in the United States and are reacting in this way, they are coddled and thin-skinned and they should just maybe toughen up. That’s the biggest thing they need to do.” Holloway: “I understand that. This is not just a black problem or a brown problem or a women’s problem or whatever. We are seeing a generation of students, and I don’t know why, who do seem less resilient than in the past. I think part of it is that things aren’t mediated like they have been in the past. You don’t have the luxury of sitting down and pondering what somebody just said, because you’re too busy putting it into a Tweet and saying, ‘This is an outrage.’ There’s no mediation of ideas. It’s all off the top of my head and it’s pain, in this case. I think that, because people are not getting enough sleep, and these things just keep on, Tweets keep coming in, that they are not equipped properly to process it all. I think that’s a major part of it. The other part is that students have been struggling at Yale for a long time, and at similar institutions. The administrations were not set up even to care about them. It’s not just that maybe students are less resilient, it’s that the administrations actually are doing more work to identify people who are struggling. In a different era, if you had a drinking problem, there’s a nod and a wink, and that’s just the way Buster behaved. Now we understand women’s side, that this thing is a real problem, and, hey, wait a second, this guy drinks and he sexually assaults somebody. We’ve got to deal with that. You build up an apparatus to deal with people in crisis, and it actually helps us understand that–you know what?–more people are in crisis than we actually thought. I think these things go hand in hand, and I don’t think anybody’s really figured it out. We can claim we figured it out, but I think no one’s got the patent on that one yet. I think I’ve said it, but I’ve actually been buoyed in the last couple days, because I’ve seen the Yale that I believe is normal–a really smart school confronting a problem and trying in a creative way to solve it together. That sounds like an advertisement but I actually believe that it operates that way. People are being increasingly willing to presume good faith on someone else’s behalf instead of just being negative. It’s as simple as that. Time will tell where this all shakes out, but I am cautiously optimistic that we are moving to a different place here. Hell, I’ve been wrong three or four times already this week, so who knows?”

Among the many accounts of Edward Snowden’s recent talk at the Hannah Arendt Center’s conference “Why Privacy Matters,” Ruth Starkman’s essay in the LA Review of Books stands out for raising the wide range of issues discussed, including some of the more controversial. For example, Starkman focuses on Snowden’s somewhat unpopular (at least at Bard) rejection of sousveillance as a response to surveillance. Sousveillance means to observe from below as opposed to the observation from above, that is, surveillance. “Indeed, Snowden flung the doors wide open on public discussions of privacy and the internet. His legacy was clear at the Bard College ‘Why Privacy Matters’ conference, which featured prominent speakers whose careers have one way or another been shaped by Snowden, including Ben Wizner. Senior editor from The Intercept Peter Maass interviewed Snowden. Fritz Schwarz of the historic Church Commission took student questions about information before and after 9/11. Kate Crawford asked questions about the sort of ethical education computer science students should receive. Jeremy Waldron argued for ‘an accountable, open’ surveillance, which allows people to talk back to and cooperate with government agencies. Astrophysicist and sci-fi author David Brin took the radical position that students and the general public at large should fight surveillance with their own cameras, as people have in the Black Lives Matter movement. Brin describes this kind of grassroots, defensive surveillance as ‘sousveillance.’ Sousveillance appeals to students of all stripes. In fact, when the Bard College Debate Union invited the West Point Debate Society to debate the question of surveillance, both sides argued that surveillance could become an instrument of the public as well as the government, and could protect ‘black and brown bodies, the LBGTQ community and other vulnerable populations.’ West Point debaters on both sides of the debate reminded the audience that this debate was purely educational and did not reflect the opinions of the United States or its military. Snowden disagrees with sousveillance: ‘We don’t need a surveillance arms race; we need to protect individual privacy.’ Bard students defended grassroots public surveillance as a tactic against the elite (an elite to which institutions like Bard, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton also belong). Snowden didn’t budge much here.”

Alfredo Corchado in The New Yorker cites Hannah Arendt Center Fellow Natalia Mendoza as a means to explore the unexpected consequences of beefed up security at the U.S.-Mexican border. “Like many other policies from Washington, this one had unintended consequences. The anthropologist Natalia Mendoza, a fellow at Bard College, observes that, because of greater border securitization, ‘the cost of smuggling has increased to a point that smugglers can no longer be independent.’ That is, as small, autonomous, local ‘mom and pop’ smuggling became more expensive and difficult, bigger, more structured, and violent organizations took over. Common-use crossing points, for instance, were now ‘privatized’ by criminal networks able to keep their operations going, absorb the rising costs, and still make a profit. Hence, groups of smugglers who used to work on their own or as subcontractors for different bosses were either pushed out of business or forced to join a larger cartel. Even if unanticipated, this process of criminal professionalization was a perfectly rational result of border security acquiring ‘industrial’ proportions: with the post-9/11 clampdown, the business of drug smuggling consolidated. The old and close-knit communities along the border never prevented drug trafficking or illegal crossing. Yet they used to function as a sort of social-control mechanism that kept drug-related violence relatively under check. People knew one another; they kept an eye on things. Suddenly, though, fear and hardened policies broke those bonds. Border communities started resembling ghost towns. The result was a surge of violence in Mexico, as cartels fought to establish dominance over important drug-shipping routes. According to estimates, the drug trade makes up between half a per cent and four per cent of Mexico’s $1.2 trillion annual G.D.P.–totaling between about six billion dollars and forty billion dollars–and employs at least half a million people. Contraband U.S. guns that are trafficked into Mexico facilitate the drug traffickers’ work. Around two hundred and fifty thousand firearms are purchased each year to be trafficked, and U.S. and Mexican authorities are seizing only about fifteen per cent of them, according to a study by the University of San Diego and Igarapé Institute.”

Seeking a way through the questions, the grandstanding about whether or not the United States should accept Syrian refugees following last week’s attack in Paris, Matt Ford suggests that we look back to the internment of Japanese residents and citizens during WWII, as well as the Supreme Court case, Korematsu v. United States, that upheld that policy: “The Supreme Court has never overturned Korematsu, largely because federal and state governments have not attempted the mass internment of an entire ethnic group since then. But the decision belongs to what legal scholars describe as the anti-canon of American constitutional law–a small group of Supreme Court rulings universally assailed as wrong, immoral, and unconstitutional. Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu form the anti-canon’s core; legal scholars sometimes include other decisions as well. Korematsu‘s place in that grim pantheon is well-earned. Courts apply strict scrutiny, the highest level of review, when weighing laws or policies that discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, or alienage. Korematsu was the standard’s first application; it was also the last time it failed to protect the group in question. ‘There is only one situation in which the Court expressly upheld racial classifications burdening minorities: the rulings affirming the constitutionality of the evacuations of Japanese-Americans during World War II,’ wrote Erwin Chemerinsky, a UC Irvine law professor and prominent scholar of constitutional law. ‘No evidence of a specific threat was required to evacuate and intern a person. Race alone was used to determine who would be uprooted and incarcerated and who would remain free.’… Expelling all Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast would have seemed unthinkable in 1940. Then came the fear and paranoia that pervaded cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco after Pearl Harbor. Frenzied reports of Japanese submarines off Oregon and saboteurs in California fueled a climate in which extreme constitutional violations towards an unpopular few seemed reasonable to a fearful many. Korematsu is a reminder that, in times of crisis, there will always be an unpopular minority to fear and opportunistic demagogues to demonize them. But central to the Bill of Rights’ purpose is the protection of the few from the cruelty of the many, no matter who that few or many may be.”

Phil Klay, a decorated Marine and winner of the National Book Award, engaged the debate over refugees in a series of twelve tweets. Here are a few: “3. The Marine hymn claims that Marines are the ‘first to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean.’–Phil Klay (@PhilKlay) November 19, 2015. 4. You’re not supposed to risk your life just for the physical safety of American citizens–Phil Klay (@PhilKlay) November 19, 2015. 5. You’re supposed to risk your life for American ideals as well…. 11. Millions of pilgrims are hurtling through the darkness, but it’s Germany that has recently been the beacon standing strong and true. Phil Klay (@PhilKlay) November 19, 2015.”

In the NY Times Magazine, Arendt Center Senior Fellow Wyatt Mason recommends Christopher Logue’s half-completed and finally posthumously published translations of Homer’s Iliad. “‘I find it boring,’ Logue said to a friend, Doris Lessing, about Homer’s epic, echoing a feeling that I–and perhaps you, too–have had upon trying to read any of the translations we’ve endured in school: I’m looking at you, Richmond Lattimore! ‘Professor Lattimore adheres to the literal at times as stubbornly as a mule eating briars,’ wrote the Thoreauvianly literate American critic Guy Davenport in his great ‘The Geography of the Imagination.’ Lattimore’s literality–English words arranged in Greek syntax–produces a language that is barely English, let alone representative of Homer’s poetry. ‘One can say in this language,’ Davenport explains, quoting Lattimore, ‘such things as “slept in that place in an exhaustion of sleep” (for Homer’s “aching with fatigue and weary for lack of sleep”) and “the shining clothes are lying away uncared for” (for “your laundry is tossed in a heap waiting to be washed”).’ Carne-Ross, who was commissioning his new ‘Iliad’ to evade translatorese, wouldn’t accept Logue’s demurral. He, too, found many translations of Homer–Lattimore’s especially–boring and had the Greek to back it up. He also had a plan for how Logue could manage the impossible task of translating a language he did not know. ‘I will make you a crib,’ Carne-Ross told Logue. A crib: a word-for-word translation of the Greek for Logue to work from. Carne-Ross also read the Greek aloud to Logue, to give him a sense of how it felt. Logue quickly discovered that there was nothing boring about Homer, only the risk of translating Homer into something boring.”

Jared Gardner suggests that comics may be a form particularly suited for describing illness: “As the authors behind the Graphic Medicine Manifesto argue, the comics form that emerged simultaneously with the new imaging technologies at the end of the 19th century was in the 20th the constant subject of experiments in the relationship between two semantic systems–word and image–as they collaborated and competed to convey meaning. The highly charged relationship wherein neither text nor image conveys the truth but together succeed in saying something more true than either could individually has been termed ‘the vital blend’ by Robert C. Harvey. This blend extends further to the relationship between creator and reader, who must, as Scott McCloud and others have argued, collaborate at every turn to make meaning by filling in the gaps of what this highly elliptical and fragmentary form necessarily leaves unwritten and undrawn. Arguably more than any other narrative form, comics have always wrestled with the challenges of making meaning out of competing systems and storytellers, yielding something different–and, when it is done right, better–than either could tell alone. And here is where comics can come to the rescue of medicine, as they did for this patient and for so many others over the last generation, modeling generative collaborations between image and text, data and narrative, creator and reader, and doctor and patient in the face of experiences seemingly impossible to relate. Graphic autobiography was born with an illness narrative–Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), about debilitating OCD–but it was not until the 1990s that illness memoirs began truly to proliferate in comics, with such seminal texts as Al Davison’s The Spiral Cage (spina bifida) and Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner’s Our Cancer Year (testicular cancer and chemotherapy). In the 21st century, narratives about mental and physical illness have emerged as the dominant form of nonfiction comics.”

The symposium will combine lectures, panel discussion, artist talks, and presentations to explore the topic in its various political, economic, and aethetic dimensions and open new ways to think about surveillance in the 21st century. At the heart of Images of Surveillance is the recognition that surveillance as object of study is far too complex to be grasped from any single point of view and thus requires us to combine multiple perspectives into a fuller picture of what surveillance might be. Such an approach rejects both disciplinary boundaries and post-modern indeterminacy in favor of a concerted effort to create overlaps and conceptual chains across a wide variety of practices and discourses.

This week on the Blog, Stefanie Rosenmüller discusses how Arendt scarcely addressed distributive justice but how her reasoning could nonetheless augment that of Martha Nussbaum, who criticized the liberal model of John Rawls, in the Quote of the Week. Albert Camus discusses the responsibility of thinking people in a world of victims and executioners in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to E. P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class” in this week’s Library feature.

William James’ Biography

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us such ideas as “the stream of thought” and the baby’s impression of the world “as one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (PP 462). It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific. “Some Remarks on Spencer’s Notion of Mind as Correspondence” (1878) and “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism and pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher’s temperament.

James hints at his religious concerns in his earliest essays and in The Principles, but they become more explicit in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1898), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and A Pluralistic Universe (1909). James oscillated between thinking that a “study in human nature” such as Varieties could contribute to a “Science of Religion” and the belief that religious experience involves an altogether supernatural domain, somehow inaccessible to science but accessible to the individual human subject.

James made some of his most important philosophical contributions in the last decade of his life. In a burst of writing in 1904–5 (collected in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)) he set out the metaphysical view most commonly known as “neutral monism,” according to which there is one fundamental “stuff” that is neither material nor mental. In “A Pluralistic Universe” he defends the mystical and anti-pragmatic view that concepts distort rather than reveal reality, and in his influential Pragmatism (1907), he presents systematically a set of views about truth, knowledge, reality, religion, and philosophy that permeate his writings from the late 1870s onwards.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Jonathan Derbyshire interviews Timothy Snyder about his new book Black Earth, in which Snyder makes the decidedly Arendtian claim that Nazi antisemitism was not simply the most recent version of traditional hatred against the Jews. Derbyshire notes that many critics have argued that Snyder downplays the connection to traditional anti-Semitism. “‘We can’t pretend,’ [Adam] Gopnik argues, ‘that the Hitlerian crimes can be released from an anti-Semitism rooted in European Christianity.’ When I met Snyder in London last week, I began by asking him what he made of that charge. TS: Anti-Semitism becomes a way in which one short-circuits an argument about why the Holocaust actually happened. If it were just anti-Semitism–for example, just popular anti-Semitism–then we’re left trying to understand why it happened then rather than at some other time. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not just a more radical hatred of the Jews than other people had. His anti-Semitism was a way of making the whole world make sense. It was a response to globalisation. Hitler was saying that in a world of finite resources what really should be happening is that races should be competing for land and therefore for food; and that this is our natural condition, this is a law of nature. And if we’re not doing that, or if we’re prevented from doing that, it’s the fault of Jews.” Arendt writes “antisemitism” instead of “anti-Semitism” to emphasize that Nazi antisemitism was a “secular nineteenth century ideology” and not the same as traditional hatred of the Jews. As an ideology, antisemitism articulated a truth that was the key to the world: namely, the Jews were the source of German suffering. Antisemitism made sense of the world and offered a solution: the extermination of the Jews. This radical ideological movement was a far cry from traditional anti-Semitism.

Mike Konczal turns to a series of recent books on legal history to land a glancing blow at those who worry that modern bureaucracy and administrative government is endangering American freedom. Legal historians have shown that well back into the 19th century, Americans turned to administrative rules and agencies to maintain safety and govern wisely. Unacknowledged in Konczal’s essay is that many–but not all–of these bureaucracies were local, as most government was in the 19th century. But aside from a politicized history, Konczal wants to make a larger political point: that bureaucracy actually secures liberty. “The administrative state was not only built on the basis of American legal norms, but it also helped to create them, and, in the process, American conceptions of liberty itself. What sort of bureaucracy could do that? One of the strongest examples is also one of the most prosaic: the Post Office. The Post Office was, at one time, a massive federal state-building enterprise. Spanning and keeping pace with a rapidly expanding frontier, the Post Office was one of the most impressive features of the early state. But not just that. As legal scholar Anuj Desai argues, it is also via the Post Office that our notion of privacy gained shape.” The early post office wanted to encourage literacy and struggled to convince a skeptical public that letters would not be subject to surveillance. It may have ultimately adopted norms preventing prying postal workers, but the post office is a governmental entity, and its record of protecting personal correspondence from government surveillance is hardly stellar. To credit the post office with the invention of privacy and the securing of liberty is more than a stretch.

Andrew Smith thinks that the imperatives of Powerpoint are a contributor to a dearth of nuanced thinking: “Let’s stay with teaching a moment. PP’s enthusiasts claim that it emboldens nervous speakers and forces everyone to present information in an ordered way. To an extent, both contentions are true. But the price of this is that the speaker dominates the audience absolutely. Where the space around and between points on a blackboard is alive with possibility, the equivalent space on a PP screen is dead. Bullet points enforce a rigidly hierarchical authority, which has not necessarily been earned. One either accepts them in toto, or not at all. And by the time any faulty logic is identified, the screen has been replaced by a new one as the speaker breezes on, safe in the knowledge that yet another waits in the wings. With everyone focused on screens, no one–least of all the speaker–is internalising the argument in a way that tests its strength…. The presentational precursor to PowerPoint was the overhead projector, which is why PP screens are still called ‘slides’. The program owes most to Whitfield Diffie, one of the time lords of online cryptography, but it was quickly snapped up by Microsoft. Its coding/marketing roots are intrinsic to its cognitive style, being relentlessly linear and encouraging short, affirmative, jargonesque assertions: arguments that are resolved, untroubled by shades of grey.”

Susan Dominus considers the way the cell phone isolates us from each other: “My mother’s address book is one of the small visual details of my childhood that I can perfectly conjure, although I am sure no photograph of it exists. Fake-leather-bound, filled with her formal, spidery script, it was, to me, barely legible, with addresses crossed out and replaced with new ones as friends’ lives shifted. I often was dispatched to grab it for her from a kitchen drawer. I knew when she was looking for someone’s phone number, which seems unremarkable, except that my own children do not know when I am searching for a phone number, because all they see is me, on my iPhone, intently focused on something mysterious and decidedly not them. It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper and scan for the information. The same, of course, could be said of how she apprised herself of the news. I always knew to whom she was talking because, before caller ID, all conversations started with what now seems like elaborate explicitness (‘Hi, Toby, this is Flora’). And when my mother spent her obligatory 20 minutes a day on the phone with her own aging mother, it played out, always, in the kitchen, where I was usually half-listening as I did my homework, waiting impatiently for her to finish. All was overt: There was much shared experience and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool, the specific use of which is almost never apparent.”

Evan Kindley considers the past and future of literary annotation: “Annotation is a form of literary lingering: It allows us to prolong our experience with a favorite book, to hang around the world of a beloved text a bit longer. But it can also serve as a gateway, for younger readers, to the pleasures of scholarship, by pointing to a larger universe of knowledge beyond. I first read The Annotated Alice at the age of eleven, and I was fascinated by its wealth of recondite information. I’m not quite sure why, at that stage of my life, I was interested in the fact that, say, the man in the folded paper hat in one of John Tenniel’s Alice illustrations resembles British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli; I’m sure I’d never even heard of Disraeli. And yet I was interested; the book taught me how to be curious about such things. Leafing through Norton’s new anniversary edition, I was surprised at how many of Gardner’s notes I remembered vividly, like his reflection on Carroll’s fondness for the number 42, or Humpty Dumpty’s aristocratic habit of offering his inferiors a single finger to shake.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan turns to Thorstein Veblen to consider the paradoxical state of college education now that it’s coming to be considered a service with students as its customers: “If more than one out of three American adults now has a bachelor’s degree, the only way to maintain a premium value on some degrees is to attach artificial prestige to them. The markers of prestige include a premium price tag. Tuition and fees at selective and private Bennington College in Vermont amount to more than $48,000 per year. Tuition and fees at public Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, just twenty-three miles away from Bennington and with just as good access to skiing and Phish bootlegs, are only $9,065 per year for Massachusetts residents. So why would someone pay $39,000 more per year–almost $156,000 over four years–to attend Bennington? There are certainly differences between the institutions. Bennington is notoriously eccentric, and students there are forced to make up their own educational programs–something that more than a few of them aren’t equipped to handle. But what justifies the premium? Prestige is part of the answer. Attending the school that produced Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt might inspire a young person in ways that sharing a degree with urban fantasy novelist Anton Strout or former Major League pitcher Ken Hill, the most notable alumni of MCLA, does not. Parents might boast of a child attending Bennington (and their own ability to foot the bill) with stickers on their Audis; an MCLA sticker, meanwhile, would look much more at home on the back of a Kia Rio. Is the quality of instruction better at premium private schools? Are the facilities better? Is the weed better? Is one school more queer-friendly than the other? Perhaps. But to understand how the good becomes all Vebleny, we must acknowledge that few students who attend expensive-looking private institutions actually pay the sticker price.” Of course, Vaidhyanathan doesn’t answer his rhetorical questions. People may be paying for prestige. But prestige is also a marker for something else–intellectual seriousness and the life of the mind. Elite colleges promise entry into an elite that is not determined by only economics. Whether elite colleges are delivering on their promise is another question.

Michael Carlson recalls the inimitable Yogi Berra in The Guardian. “Yogi Berra, who has died aged 90, was one of baseball’s greatest catchers: he played on 14 American League championship teams and won 10 World Series titles, totals unmatched in the game’s history. But while his sporting fame matched that of his fellow New York Yankees Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, he also achieved a much wider celebrity–first because he served as the model for the popular cartoon character Yogi Bear, and second because his pursuit of a highly personal logic created such ‘Yogisms’ as ‘it ain’t over till it’s over’ and ‘it’s like deja vu all over again’, which have long since passed into everyday currency. A stocky 5ft 8in with a jug-eared gnomish face, Berra hardly looked like a sportsman. The baseball writer Bill James once quipped: ‘If he were a piece of furniture, you’d sand him.’ But, as his longtime manager Casey Stengel, explained: ‘He isn’t much to look at, he looks like he’s doing everything wrong, but he can hit.'”

Marcus Llanque engages with Arendt’s original intention, which was not to criticize the idea of human rights as such but the specific concept of that idea that prevailed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which dominates human rights discourse in our times. In Arendt’s view, human rights can only guide actions, but they cannot replace them. Historically, human rights were most successful when they were linked to the foundation of a polity guided by the principles that human rights stand for. Her argument reflects a classical republican position by emphasizing that norms are nothing without actors and that it is the purpose of human beings, not just to enjoy as many rights as possible but to also be able to act in the first place.

Marcus Llanque is Professor for Political Theory at University of Augsburg/ Germany. He’s published several books on the theory of democracy, republicanism, and the history of political ideas. He is the editor of Hannah Arendt’s “What is Politics?” within the upcoming critical edition of Arendt’s complete works.

Resolved: “National security is more important than the individual right to privacy.”

Please join us for an exciting public debate inspired by the topic of this year’s Hannah Arendt Center Conference, “Why Privacy Matters.” The debate will feature Bard Debate Union members, Bard College faculty, and cadets and faculty from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

**UPDATE** Registration for our conference is NOW CLOSED except for on-site registration, which is subject to availability and will cost $45 for ALL interested parties except those of the Bard community.

Hannah Arendt always returned to poetry and kept the language of German poems in her hinterkopf. For Arendt, poetry is the closest form we have to thought itself, bearing the burden of language and memory. It should then be no surprise that Arendt herself wrote poems.

The poems now appear in translation for the first time, edited and translated into English by Samantha Hill and into French by Karin Biro. Biro and Hill join us to read from their translations and discuss Arendt’s poetry, the work of translation, and the place of poetry across Arendt’s political and philosophical works.

National Endowment for the Humanities/Hannah Arendt Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow DAVID BRIN is a scientist who has served as a NASA visiting scholar in exobiology. As a writer of science fiction, he has received the Nebula award, two Hugo awards, and four Locus awards, and has published books including Earth and The Postman. He is also the author of The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy?

The special event will take place in Manhattan on Oct. 26, 2015, 6.30pm, at the Bard Graduate Center at 38. West 86th Street, New York, NY, in conjunction with The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The Introductory Presentation will be by Professor Nikolaus Wachsmann, author of the acclaimed, new book, KL: A History of the Concentration Camps.

Honoree Albert Knoll, b. 1958, has served the mission of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Museum since 1997. In addition to maintaining and expanding its archival work and databases, he has been instrumental in assisting relatives of former inmates as well as guiding researchers, scholars and authors around the world – including Awards Event speaker Nickolaus Wachsmann. Knoll has written articles on illegal photos, homosexual prisoners, contemporary Nazi press coverage of Dachau, etc, and contributed to the International Tracing Service’s first scholarly yearbook. He has also organized international workshops on the gathering of data on all categories of National Socialist victims.

This week on the Blog, Kathleen B. Jones notes how observing the reactions of European countries to the ongoing migrant crisis is cause for feelings of possibility followed by despair in the Quote of the Week. Peter Baehr explains why the People’s Republic of China is fertile territory for Arendt scholars and wonders where they are as Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the United States. Charles William Eliot provides his comments on how an efficient man is capable of thinking in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate some marginalia Arendt made in her copy of “Lectures on the French Revolution” in relation to America, revolution theory, and liberty in this week’s Library feature.

Charles William Eliot’s Biography

Charles William Eliot, (born March 20, 1834, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Aug. 22, 1926, Northeast Harbor, Maine), American educator, leader in public affairs, president of Harvard University for 40 years, and editor of the 50-volume Harvard Classics (1909–10).

Eliot graduated from Harvard in 1853 and was appointed assistant professor of mathematics and chemistry there in 1858. In 1867, during his second trip to Europe, he made a study of European educational systems. His published observations (in The Atlantic Monthly, 1869) brought his name to the attention of the directors of Harvard, who were looking for a new president. Eliot was inaugurated in October 1869. By the time he retired in 1909 he had elevated Harvard into an institution of world renown.

Contending that higher learning in the United States needed to be “broadened, deepened, and invigorated,” Eliot demanded a place for the sciences as well as the humanities in any sound program of liberal education. To counter the rigidity of the Harvard curriculum—which, following what was then general practice, was then almost totally prescribed—Eliot eliminated required courses. Under his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, a balance was struck between required and elective courses.

Eliot’s influence reached into secondary education. During his presidency Harvard raised its entrance requirements, and other major colleges did likewise. This, in turn, effected a corresponding rise in secondary-school standards. In the report of the Committee of Ten, a national commission on secondary education (1893), he urged the introduction of foreign languages and mathematics during the student’s seventh school year. The idea was embodied later (1910) by the introduction of junior high schools in the United States. Eliot served as president of the National Education Association (1903) and was the first honorary president of the Progressive Education Association (1919).

Sir Aubrey De Vere’s Biography

De Vere, Sir Aubrey, Bart., was born, probably at Curragh Chase, County of Limerick, 20th August 1788. He combined high literary attainments with the performance of his duties as a landlord and country gentleman. Besides numerous poetical works, he was author of a drama, Mary Tudor, that has lately attracted renewed attention on account of the appearance of Tennyson’s drama of Queen Mary. Hayes, in his Ballads, writes of De Vere as “distinguished for his literary attainments, and for his high poetic genius… He depicts the tragic passions with power and truthfulness… His poems and songs are instinct with grace and feeling.” He was the friend and ardent admirer of Wordsworth. Sir Aubrey died, as he had lived, in the home of his infancy, Curragh Chase, 5th July 1846, aged 57. His works are sometimes confused with those of his son, the poet, Aubrey de Vere.

“In solitude a dialogue always arises, because even in solitude there are always two.”

— Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch

In the back of a volume of letters sent between Louise von Salome and Rainer Maria Rilke, Hannah Arendt wrote in pencil: “253, 256, Einsamkeit.” On the corresponding pages, she marked out two passages from a letter from Rilke to Salome from January 10th, 1912. The first:

Can I, despite everything, move on through all this? If people happen to be present they offer me the relief of being able to be more or less the person they take me for, without being too particular about my actual existence. How often do I step out of my room as, so to speak, some chaos, and outside, perceived by someone else’s mind, assume a composure that is actually his and in the next moment, to my astonishment, find myself expressing well-formed things, while just before everything in my entire consciousness was utterly amorphous.

“A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

The claim that an entirely public life is “shallow” is somewhat surprising given that Arendt’s name has become almost synonymous with a politics of publicity and public disclosure. Interpreters of Arendt usually contrast the public life of politics with the private life of the household and uphold the former as the more authentic representation of Arendtian values. Arendt herself often opposes public life with private life, and in her essay “What is Freedom?,” she states that it takes “courage” to “leave the security of our four walls” and enter the public realm. Continue reading →

William Henry Bragg’s Biography

William Henry Bragg was a professor of physics and mathematics, and was known for making important contributions to many scientific disciplines. Born in Westward, Cumberland in the United Kingdom on July 2, 1862, Bragg was thoroughly educated while attending Market Harborough Grammar School and King William’s College in the Isle of Man. He later went on to study physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, as well as becoming elected to the Professorship of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Adelaide, in Southern Australia. Bragg’s career continued to flourish, and he was subsequently appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics at Leeds, Quain Professor of Physics at the University College London, and Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution.

Bragg had numerous research interests, but the work that earned him a rank as one the great leaders in science was his historic advancements in X-ray crystallography….

Bragg turned his attention to detection of sound in water during the First World War, and spent several years conducting research on the detection and measurement of sound with the intention of locating submarines. Following the war, Bragg was knighted and earned the Order of Merit in 1931. He was elected president of the Royal Society in 1935. His reputation earned Bragg honorary doctorate degrees from over 15 universities, and he was a distinguished member of many leading foreign science societies. Bragg was awarded the Royal Society’s Rumford Medal in 1916 and the highest award, the Copley Medal in 1930. After a lifetime of achievement, Bragg died quietly on March 10, 1942.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Hasan Elahi started a self-surveillance art series when he was mistakenly reported to the FBI’s terrorist watch list in 2001, and he’s been reporting his movements online through his website every day since. But what started as a series on the way people are being watched became a series about the way we’re watching ourselves: “Making the mundane details of his life publicly available became ‘a very pragmatic solution to keep from being shipped off to Guantanamo.’ He still faithfully updates his location every time he makes a major move–from his house to the gas station, from the gas station to his job. And he takes pictures of literally everything he does, whether shopping at the grocery store, eating at his favorite Chinese restaurant, or peeing in the bathroom. Strangely enough, Elahi says doing so has allowed him to live a relatively anonymous, quiet existence. ‘I like to think of it as aggressive compliance,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been fascinated with Magellan and the concept of circumnavigation: going far enough in one direction to end up in the other.’ But while the project started out as a response to state surveillance, it’s become a parody of the way people now put their entire lives online for anyone–friends, stalkers, government agents–to follow. And it’s remarkable how quickly it’s happened: when Elahi first started photographing his meals, his friends thought it was weird. Now everyone does it, and some restaurants even have no-photo policies. Elahi doesn’t think what he’s doing is any stranger than if he were constantly tweeting, checking in on location apps, or posting photos on Facebook. ‘These days, we’re so wired 24/7 that you have to go out of your way not to be connected,’ he said.” All of this recalls Richard Sennett’s “paradox of visibility and isolation” in his classic The Fall of Public Man. As we are ever more visible in public through cameras, data collection, and the expressiveness of clothes, tweets, and public displays of affection, there is the consequent compensation that we insist on not revealing our true selves. As Sennett writes: “Isolation in the midst of visibility to others was a logical consequence of insisting on one’s right to be mute when one ventured into this chaotic yet still magnetic realm.” There is a way in which we expose ourselves, but in doing so neutralize and appease those who observe us without actually revealing our true passions, hopes, and desires. The problem, as Sennett argues, is that we then begin to lose the ability to “imagine social relations which would arouse much passion….” The result is that we come to imagine a passionless “public life in which people behave, and manage their behavior, only through withdrawal, ‘accommodation,’ and ‘appeasement.'”

Rosemary Pooler and Richard Wesley penned Turkmen v. Ashcroft, an important decision from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals this month. (h/t Alan Sussman) The decision reinstated a lawsuit against John Ashcroft and other prison and government officials. The plaintiffs are a group of eight Muslims who were arrested on immigration charges after 9/11 and who were then held and interrogated for between three and eight months. The complaint concerned discriminatory treatment based upon a policy by Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller “whereby any Muslim or Arab man encountered during the investigation of a tip received in the 9/11 terrorism investigation . . . and discovered to be a non-citizen who had violated the terms of his visa, was arrested.” The plaintiffs in this suit were arrested, sent to maximum security prisons, subjected to constant strip searches, sleep deprivation, and other harsh interrogation techniques on no evidence except their apparent Muslim faith. Pooler and Wesley, in deciding to reinstate the plaintiff’s lawsuit, offer these stirring and more than appropriate final thoughts: “If there is one guiding principle to our nation it is the rule of law. It protects the unpopular view, it restrains fear-based responses in times of trouble, and it sanctifies individual liberty regardless of wealth, faith, or color. The Constitution defines the limits of the Defendants’ authority; detaining individuals as if they were terrorists, in the most restrictive conditions of confinement available, simply because these individuals were, or appeared to be, Arab or Muslim exceeds those limits. It might well be that national security concerns motivated the Defendants to take action, but that is of little solace to those who felt the brunt of that decision. The suffering endured by those who were imprisoned merely because they were caught up in the hysteria of the days immediately following 9/11 is not without a remedy. Holding individuals in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day with regular strip searches because their perceived faith or race placed them in the group targeted for recruitment by al Qaeda violated the detainees’ constitutional rights. To use such a broad and general basis for such severe confinement without any further particularization of a reason to suspect an individual’s connection to terrorist activities requires certain assumptions about the ‘targeted group’ not offered by Defendants nor supported in the record. It assumes that members of the group were already allied with or would be easily converted to the terrorist cause, until proven otherwise. Why else would no further particularization of a connection to terrorism be required? Perceived membership in the ‘targeted group’ was seemingly enough to justify extended confinement in the most restrictive conditions available.” Plaintiff’s brought this lawsuit in April, 2002, over 13 years ago. Justice can be slow. But one hopes that at least eventually it will be served.

Tom Engelhardt asks the important and difficult question–Is there a new political system emerging in the United States? His five-part account suggests that may well be. “Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name. And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so. Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of ‘we the people.’ Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.”

Thinking about global warming and environmental disasters can be numbing and depressing. But in the New Yorker this week, Bill McKibben offers a reason to hope. He tells of Mark and Sara Borkowski in Rutland, Vermont. With help from Vermont’s Green Mountain Power, the Borkowski’s “stuffed the house with new insulation, put in a heat pump for the hot water, and installed two air-source heat pumps to warm the home. They also switched all the light bulbs to L.E.D.s and put a small solar array on the slate roof of the garage. The Borkowskis paid for the improvements, but the utility financed the charges through their electric bill, which fell the very first month. Before the makeover, from October of 2013 to January of 2014, the Borkowskis used thirty-four hundred and eleven kilowatt-hours of electricity and three hundred and twenty-five gallons of fuel oil. From October of 2014 to January of 2015, they used twenty-eight hundred and fifty-six kilowatt-hours of electricity and no oil at all. President Obama has announced that by 2025 he wants the United States to reduce its total carbon footprint by up to twenty-eight per cent of 2005 levels. The Borkowskis reduced the footprint of their house by eighty-eight per cent in a matter of days, and at no net cost. I’ve travelled the world writing about and organizing against climate change, but, standing in the Borkowskis’ kitchen and looking at their electric bill, I felt a fairly rare emotion: hope. The numbers reveal a sudden new truth–that innovative, energy-saving and energy-producing technology is now cheap enough for everyday use. The Borkowskis’ house is not an Aspen earth shelter made of adobe and old tires, built by a former software executive who converted to planetary consciousness at Burning Man. It’s an utterly plain house, with Frozen bedspreads and One Direction posters, inhabited by a working-class family of four, two rabbits, and a parakeet named Oliver.” McKibben also writes of Richard Kauffman, the NY State energy czar, who cites Hannah Arendt for inspiration. “Kauffman has all sorts of plans, from a ‘green bank’–to attract private-sector capital to finance extensive energy-saving retrofits–to new rules that would pressure utilities to play nicely with outside partners like Solar City. ‘It’s kind of a Hannah Arendt thing,’ he said. ‘There’s not a lot of intentional evil in utilities. But we’ve created a golden cage for them, protected them from enormous trends.’ We were on the subway again, and as it clattered back toward Manhattan Kauffman had to shout to be heard: ‘Our aim is to create a policy environment that is not standing against the forces of history but is in line with them.'”

In an interview, author and ghostwriter Hilary Liftin talks about the way she interacts with her subjects: “I have a particular role: to represent the person I’m writing for and to create a voice for that person. But the other thing that I bring to it is empathy. There are certain jobs I don’t take because I feel no connection to the person. But if somebody is open with me, and honest about their motivations, and has some level of self-awareness, then I’m going to understand them. The same way you’d feel if you sat down with a criminal and they told you their life story. You would probably understand the crime and forgive it. None of my clients are criminals, but to a much lighter degree that’s what goes on. I hear the story, and I hear it with the level of detail that breeds empathy…. I’m not creating a voice out of thin air. Everyone has a public voice, and a lot of actors have developed sound-bitey public voices. But that doesn’t translate to paper. That’s why they can’t just dictate a book, even if they’re good storytellers. So the question is: how can I manifest the quirks and thoughts and uniqueness of their own personalities? In part, I do that by typing when they talk. I don’t record. That is a way for my brain to take in the voice. My goal is that when my client reads a book they feel like, ‘Hilary did something but mostly she just made it happen quickly.’ I think people dismiss celebrity memoirs as unreal, contrived and maybe partially made up. But that’s definitely not true for anything that I write.”

Tamar Adler waxes poetic about preserves: “I have felt lucky, as a grown person, to discover that this thing I loved in innocent abstraction had real importance. Salting and drying meat and fish helped human beings to last through long winters, sea voyages and treacherous overland trails. If cultivating soil was what let us settle, it was harnessing bacterial cultures and sugar, salt, acid, fat, sun and wind to paralyze microorganisms and save food from decay that let us unmoor, discovering all the world that was not visible from our cabbage patches. Basque cider allowed seamen to cross oceans. Dutch pickled herring fueled the exploration of the New World. Vikings spread cod in the riggings of their ships to dry and stiffen in the cold wind, then traded on it as they battled through Scandinavia, the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Cheese was first a way of preserving milk; wine, of grape juice; sauerkraut, of cabbage; prosciutto, of pork. In this sense, all preserved things are additionally miraculous, in that they all are also ways of storing other things: part vessel, part content.”

Tiffany Jenkins responds to the query, “Why Value Privacy?” with this answer citing Hannah Arendt. “Where privacy is as important, but perhaps less obviously so, is in relation to the development of the human person. Privacy allows us to retreat from the world, for a while, to not be ‘on show’ all the time, to take our face off. It is space without scrutiny and immediate judgment in which we can take time out and reflect. Here, we can be vulnerable. Here, we can experiment and try things out. Here, we can make mistakes. We can be ourselves; learning and developing what that means. And that we have some say over what others know and what they do not know, is a way to develop autonomy and self-possession. All this helps us to sure up psychological and social depth. As the writer Hannah Arendt put it: ‘A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.'” We couldn’t agree more, which is why the Hannah Arendt Center is hosting our 8th Annual Conference “Why Privacy Matters: What Do We Lose When We Lose Our Privacy?” The Conference is Oct. 15-16. You can read about it and register here.

This week on the Blog, Charles Snyder reflects on how dianoetic laughter frees us from the misery that arises from our constant failure to be able to converse with ourselves in the Quote of the Week. Australian philosopher Peter Singer discusses how thinking helps constitute the meaning of philosophy in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we share an image sent to us by the Goethe-Institut New York of some of Arendt’s writings housed in its library in this week’s Library feature.